Airbnb Has Built The Most Luxurious Call Center You've Ever Seen

Airbnb's new call center
is designed to be the anti-call-center.Jeremy Bittermann

Airbnb is opening its first standalone call center in Portland,
Oregon. But it’s a far cry from the grid of cubicles you’d
expect.

Rather than windowless work stations where employees read
off teleprompter-like screens, the open-space call center is
appointed with shared desks, long couches, light wood, and
exposed brick, reports Margaret Rhodes inWired.

The 250 staffers who work there don’t even have traditional
“desks.” Instead they are given “landing spots,” which are
similar to the cubbies given to children in kindergarten.

The landing spots are small areas where teams of employees
can drop off their personal items in the morning and leave their
computers and gadgets to charge overnight.

The customer-service agents' remaining time is spent
working in a relaxed atmosphere. The call center features
custom-designed conference rooms, couches for reclining, big
communal tables, and small nooks for longer chats.

Employees can work
wherever they like and there's not a cubicle to be found.Jeremy Bittermann

“You want a cave, but you also want a vista,” Aaron Harvey,
coleader of Airbnb’s internal-environments design team,
explains.

“In a typical environment, the cubicle is your world and
the rest is the company’s world, and they’re very territorial
about the cubicles. We wanted to evaporate that territorialism
and turn it into a collective place.”